Inclusive Improvement: Standards and Smallholders
Inclusive Improvement: Standards and Smallholders
Book now available online
Millions of smallholder families in tropical commodity chains can double their income through improved management (specifically to enhance waste recycling), through better control over green house gas emission (through regular methane production and composting), through decreasing external inputs and through a focus on improving product quality. This book argues that combining sustainable development and poverty reduction is feasible. But it requires efforts of such magnitude that all parties involved must have ample room to fully play and expand their role. Inclusive improvement can be achieved for small-scale producers, by reducing minimum requirements and by focusing on standardizing the process of improvement itself.
Most reports by auditors and certification bodies contain suggestions for improvements. Better is to let producers themselves demonstrate how to solve problems and improve. Let producers transparently plan and work on improvements. Producers are ready to cooperate if they feel that support is reliable and consistent. In this book, based on 20 years of experience, Hivos provides tools and suggestions towards reliable and consistent support.
Surprisingly agreement appears possible on common objectives and related progress indicators. This book offers examples and also serves as an invitation to discussion. The central issue in the book is management. Related issues are centralization and decentralization of decision making and a top-down versus a bottom-up attitude.
Summary
HIVOS is working to achieve sustainable development and poverty reduction using a simplified generic management system as a tool. This effort has been closely monitored in pilot projects involving groups of smallholders in coffee and vegetable production in Kenya and South Africa. This book reflects on HIVOS’s experiences and summarizes its successes and challenges. It argues that a sufficient basis has been found for continuation and possibly scaling up of the efforts, and it proposes a stylized interaction model as the way forward. Improvement processes are central to this book, in both its content and its structure. Improvement is seen as a never-ending process, visualized through cycles of continual attempts to do better, based on the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act Wheel. We present two interconnected improvement cycles: an inner cycle of improvement processes by which smallholder groups help themselves and an outer cycle of improvement processes in the support structure.
For the inner cycle, we argue that smallholder groups have a better chance of increasing their incomes and enhancing their empowerment if they have the capacity to autonomously manage an improvement process. However, achieving and consolidating improvements in the inner cycle is made unnecessarily difficult by the lack of coordination among actors in the outer cycle: civil society and funding organizations, trainers, standards and certification bodies, and commercial buyers. None of these actors possesses the authority and legitimacy to coordinate on behalf of the smallholder groups. But the supporting actors in the outer cycle can agree on common objectives and progress indicators. On that basis the interactions amongst actors in the outer cycle can be improved, which is a major objective of this book. This book attempts to develop a common language, to be used by the various interest groups to enable them to coordinate their activities more effectively, where and when they identify overlapping interests.
The book starts and finishes by addressing each of the different interest groups individually, while the rest of the book applies our common language based on ISO terminology, which in our view offers a consistent point of departure. To improve coordination in the support structure we propose alignment of the logical frameworks used by the various civil society organizations in the outer cycle. Finally, we conclude that the present support structure is dominated by a top-down attitude, which is not sufficiently balanced with a bottom-up attitude that takes the needs of smallholder groups as the starting point. We suggest this problem be addressed by introducing reference groups as a way to strengthen the ‘voice’ of smallholder group interests in the functioning of the outer cycle.
The other main challenge, next to improving coordination in the outer cycle, is to ensure inclusiveness in the inner cycle. Experience in the pilot projects indicates that inclusiveness is possible in many cases. Nonetheless, we need to develop robust progress indicators and monitor improvement processes over longer periods to be able to fortify our basic argument; that is, a generic quality improvement process is an important tool that can enable smallholder groups to increase their incomes and enhance their empowerment.
The book in PDF format can be downloaded below. The hard-copy edition of the book will be published 25 Oct 2009 and can be ordered from this website.